Campus Notebook: Group focuses on importance of local voting

Published 5:05 pm, Wednesday, October 17, 2012

More than 1,000 people were registered to vote during a drive last week initiated by a new University at Albany student group, Think Globally, Vote Locally.

Students decided to cast their votes where they live eight months out of the year — instead of by absentee ballot — in Albany, said organizer Martha Mahoney.

This year, students want to be in on the presidential, congressional and state legislative elections, weighing in on issues such as the economy, the SUNY budget, the job market and the war in Afghanistan, she said.

TGVL was founded at SUNY Geneseo eight years ago. The group encourages students to register where they live for convenience, assurance of their vote being counted, and the power of students voting as a bloc. In 2004, 1,500 students were registered to vote in the town of Geneseo in Livingston County.

The issue of college students as a voting bloc has been controversial in the past. In the national election, college students have not really lived up to their promise of being an influential voting group. However, in local elections, where races can be decided by a handful of votes, students can have a significant difference. Sometimes, locals complain that students are just temporary residents and shouldn't be allowed to make such important decisions. Students counter that they should be allowed to vote in the communities where they live at the time of the election.

This week, the state Board of Elections asked the Dutchess County Board of Elections to ease requirements for registering college students to vote. Students at the Culinary Institute of America and Bard College claimed they were discriminated against because they tend to vote Democrat, but the county's Republican election commissioner, Erik Haight, insisted he wanted to make sure voter registrations were complete. Students listed a post office, but not a dormitory address, which he said made their forms incomplete.

Word invention

Inventing a word that actually ends up in a dictionary someday is not easy.

The comedian Steven Colbert did it with "truthiness," which he debuted on his show "The Colbert Report" during the George Bush era. It hilariously pinpointed the approximation of reality that politicians attempt when they weave their own reality around facts. It took about a year of the word circulating widely through pop culture before "truthiness" made it into the New Oxford American Dictionary.

Now, SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher is attempting to make "systemness" a real word and has had an employee create a Wikipedia page for the word. She used the word in reference to higher education during her state of the university speech in January; a quick Internet search shows it's one of those wonky terms that's been used in fields of health care and economics for some time. She defines it as "the coordination of multiple components that, when working together, create a network of activity that is more powerful than any action of individual parts on their own."

By systemness, Zimpher meant that she wanted to leverage the strength of each SUNY campus to act with a common set of goals that would create a stronger public university system and better way of life for all residents of New York.

Zimpher has repeated the word many times since then, in person, and in press releases and editorials. The SUNY-created Wikipedia entry details her personal history of the word and even likens it to "truthiness."

It's not as catchy, but Zimpher has a high perch. Can she make systemness a "real" word?